Frontiers in Psychology
February 9, 2026
Akbota Tleuberdinova
The origin of consciousness remains one of the oldest problems in both science and philosophy. Several emerging theories provide new perspectives on the origin and evolution of consciousness, including Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory and the Cognition-Based Evolution (CBE) theory. Moreover, declarations such as the New York Declaration on animal consciousness further underscore the...
Frontiers in Psychology
February 4, 2026
Juan Camilo Benítez-Agudelo, Eduardo Navarro-Jiménez, Vicente Javier Clemente-suárez
Introduction Academic stress represents a multifactorial psychophysiological phenomenon that can disrupt emotional well-being and autonomic balance in university students. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have shown promise in enhancing emotional regulation and physiological balance. This study aimed to evaluate the autonomic and psychophysiological effects of a 13-week mindfulness-based...
Frontiers in Psychology
February 2, 2026
Anneli O. Borgen, Eline L. Håkedal, Nanja Holland Hansen
Objectives: This study aimed to qualitatively explore the experiences of professionals in social services who completed a compassion training intervention in their workplace. The focus was on understanding how contextual factors influence the implementation of such an intervention. Additionally, the study sought to investigate how the professionals perceive and apply compassion and...
Frontiers in Psychology
January 30, 2026
Nina Zech, Martin Busch, Veronika K. Jaeger et al.
Introduction: Mind-body interventions are increasingly used in health care, both for physical and for psychological therapy. With directing the focus to the body and inner experiences they include elements of trance induction and hypnosis. The scope of this experimental study was to test the hypothesis that a non-ordinary state of consciousness may occur during a mind-body intervention with...
Frontiers in Psychology
January 7, 2026
Jeff Sebo
1 citation
Historically, scientists and philosophers have tended to assume that animals lack consciousness until evidence shows otherwise. Recently, however, some researchers have proposed reversing this assumption. Other options are available as well; for example, in addition to assuming that all animals are conscious, we can assume that all living beings are conscious, that all beings with nervous...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Robert Worden
Many theories of consciousness propose that consciousness arises from neural computation in the brain. All information in a neural computer is physically encoded, but consciousness contains un-encoded information about local space. The information required for decoding does not reside in the brain. So consciousness cannot arise from encoded neural information; but it could arise from un-encoded...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Ivan A Khvatov
Research on animal self-awareness has long been organized around the mirror test and related self-recognition paradigms, encouraging a binary framing of whether a given species does or does not possess self-awareness. However, accumulating evidence suggests that animal self-representation cannot be reduced to a single experimental criterion, sensory modality, or linear evolutionary scale. This...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Recai Kayış
Reports of near-death experiences (NDEs), end-of-life visions (ELVs), and culturally embedded afterlife narratives frequently describe profoundly positive or distressing states. Traditional interpretations treat these phenomena as evidence of external metaphysical realms. The Dying-Moment Dream Hypothesis proposes an alternative, neurobiologically grounded explanation: that culturally...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
James Meaden
Burnout among knowledge workers presents a puzzle: many workers report persistent burnout despite relatively favorable conditions, and interventions show limited lasting effects. Dominant resource models assume rest restores function, yet cannot fully explain why recovery fails despite adequate time, why burnout remains stable despite accumulating resources, or why mindfulness intervention...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Tatsuya Daikoku
Creativity in human societies may be sustained not by isolated minds but by embodied, collective intelligence. Using music as a tractable model system, this paper reviews evidence that creativity depends on the dynamic tuning of uncertainty: moderate, time-varying surprise-often accompanied by interoceptive bodily sensations-can promote exploration, while interpersonal synchrony and social...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Felix M G Woolford, Keisuke Suzuki
Intentional binding has been proposed as an implicit measure of shared sense of agency in joint action, yet it remains unclear whether it distinguishes between individual and different forms of joint control. We compared intentional binding across individual action, human-computer joint control, and human-human joint control in a physically coupled button-pressing task using haptic feedback...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Jian Sun, Li Jin
Depression is a highly prevalent mental disorder worldwide, and its cognitive rigidity-characterized by persistent negative beliefs resistant to countervailing evidence-remains a critical puzzle in philosophical psychiatry and clinical psychology. Existing theories of abductive reasoning have struggled to explain why similar adversities lead to rigid negative cognition in some individuals but...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Conor H. Murray, Kafui Dzirasa, Dana W. Sawyer et al.
What consciousness is, and how it relates to the body and nature at large, are among the most enduring questions in human history. Notable thinkers have long grappled with its definition, mechanisms, and purpose. In this review, we examine both historical and contemporary perspectives on consciousness across philosophy, science, medicine, and practice. By integrating diverse perspectives and...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Christian Kronsted, Matthew Henley, Miriam Giguere
The Kolb Learning Cycle is a popular model of experiential learning in which agents move through four phases: experimentation, concretization, observation, and conceptualization. This model is a dynamic learning model that aligns well with embodied approaches to cognition, as it centers on student agency, inquiry, and exploration. However, there is currently no 4E (embodied, enactive, embedded,...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Sarfaraz K Niazi
Empathy is a core neurobiological capacity that enables humans to perceive, understand, and respond to others' experiences, yet its deliberate modulation as a therapeutic target is still in its early stages of scientific development. This manuscript presents a hybrid narrative-scoping review synthesizing evidence across pharmacological, neurostimulation, and behavioral approaches aimed at...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Giorgio Marchetti
This article aims to explain how emotions arise and operate within the framework of my attention-based theory of consciousness, referred to here as the AME theory of consciousness (Attentional Modulation of Energy). According to the AME theory of consciousness, the phenomenal aspect of consciousness is produced by the modulation of the energy level of the area of the organ of attention (aOA)...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Merwyn Yu Xian Lee, Megan Wan Ting Tay, Meng Leong Chia et al.
Mindfulness meditation (MM) is a promising cognitive strategy that may facilitate motor learning by improving attention and reducing anxiety. Our study aimed to investigate the effects of guided MM on motor learning in healthy young adults. The study was conducted as randomised controlled trials where 24 meditation-naive participants underwent either a 10-min MM session or seated rest (CT)...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Sushil Prasad Mahato, Manickam Anjaladevi, Abinash Roy et al.
Meditation facilitates brain-body integration by synchronizing neural oscillations with autonomic rhythms. Nonetheless, the effects of heartfulness (heart-centered) and bell (sound-based) meditation on electroencephalography (EEG) and autonomic markers remain insufficiently explored. In this randomized, exploratory pilot study, nine healthy male university students were allocated to the...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Leonardo Christov-Moore, Félix Schoeller, Mathilda Von Guttenberg et al.
Non-pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness that promote mental health and wellbeing are a growing focus of clinical and basic research. Previous work has revealed the mood-augmenting, belief-altering, and self-transcendent effects of aesthetic-chills-inducing audiovisual stimulation. The current study investigated how a guided loving kindness meditation (LKM) combined with...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Benjamin Kozuch, Peter Kok
This article presents a framework for identifying the neural correlates of a low-level component of visual consciousness, base experience, defined as the spatial arrangement of colors experienced across the visual field. We propose a content-matching method that compares the content of base experience with that represented by candidate neural systems, treating content matches and mismatches as...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Zhongfu Zhang, Qingqin Xu, Jing Wang et al.
Chronic tinnitus is often accompanied by considerable psychological burden, including anxiety, depression, and impaired quality of life. Mindfulness-based therapy has attracted growing attention as a potential psychological intervention for tinnitus management. This narrative review examines the current literature on the rationale, clinical application, reported efficacy, limitations, and...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Federica Mauro
Classical accounts of well-being have largely been grounded in homeostasis, conceptualizing well-being as the regulation of affective states around defended set points. More recent Bayesian and active inference approaches similarly characterize living systems as predictive regulators that maintain viable states by minimizing expected surprise. Building on these perspectives, this article...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Chengyu Zhang, Xin Shan, Huasen Zhang et al.
Music performance anxiety (MPA) can substantially impair musicians' learning, performance, and psychological functioning. Although mindfulness- and acceptance-based interventions (MABIs) have shown promise for MPA, their pooled effects, boundary conditions, and mechanism-related commonalities remain insufficiently understood. Grounded in a dual-path explanatory framework emphasizing decentering...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Jingxin Deng, Fang Xu
This study aimed to evaluate the impact of an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program on sleep quality and academic stress among Chinese school adolescents. A total of 46 students were recruited and randomly assigned to either the experimental group (n=22), which participated in the 8-week MBSR program, or the control group (n=24), which received no intervention. Assessments...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Isabella Langwei, Bin Li
The recognition of collective optimal experience remains structurally unresolved in psychology. Existing frameworks-from group flow to collective effervescence-have extended optimal experience to the collective level, yet they have generally treated individual reports as the primary endpoint for determining whether such experience has occurred, leaving unresolved how collective recognition...